The ending is polarizing: either people will find it operatic and a truly great climax, or just plain laughably overwrought.
I personally enjoyed it. The film truly is a cinematic tour de force, to quote Stephen Holden. It just has that pizazz that I don’t really see in movies anymore. Every frame is alive.
And of course Tilda’s astounding performance (in Italian and Russian) goes without saying.
I AM LOVE was an astounding movie, as I really loved the exquisite detail and had to pay close attention to the intertwined plot lines. They just don’t make movies like this one any more. Tilda Swinton was fantastic.
Ahhhhh I want to see this so bad but the release is still two months away here…
Italians have been making the best costume dramas this year
i saw it at sundance. talk about style over substance.
Well the emotion is certainly there..but yes, the plot could be a little stronger.
But still, what style it is!
Style IS substance.
Tilda is a Goddess!!!!!
Io Sono L’amore
I had high hopes. Even the negative reviews made me think that I would like it. And the film is quite brilliantly directed and beautifully acted by Tilda. But, alas, a trite tale nicely told is still trite. It’s a sub-soap opera story filled with uninteresting characters featuring the genre’s most banal and moralistic narrative arch: a woman’s unrestrained passion and “immorality” lead to inadvertently tragic consequences. Blah.
Really quite awful. Mostly it got my attention because it incorporates music from various of John Adams’ orchestral compositions. Now that I have sat through this bland drama, I am shocked that the composer consented to this appropriation. And the torrent of praise given this film, from even our most insightful professional critics, confirms simply that a tale about a woman who feels trapped but escapes in the end will milk, without fail, any faux-progressive’s heart (like auditing coursework from a women’s studies program). This is basically a second-rate revival of Tilda Swinton’s early feminist film “Orlando” in a rather different era and with much less subtlety.
What on earth are you talking about? “I Am Love” has nothing in common with “Orlando.”
@Ehrenstein: Thnk harder.
No that’s YOUR job.
What does Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s fanciful transgender fantasry have to do with Luca’s tale of adultery amidst the Milanese upper classes?
NOTHING
save for the same star.
Therefore. . ..YOU POINT?
Mubi is a bit more sophisticated of a community than this. I am not responding.
I Am Love, to me, had such strong directing and cinematography I can forgive the melodramatic core plotline. The one thing that bugged me was the writer’s use of ‘lightning’ to drive the plot.
(Whenever a character dies by pure random chance, I call it ‘lightning’. Because it might as well have been.)
I don’t see the cause of disaster being ‘female immorality’. The lead character was reasserting her independent identity after having subsumed it to a rich Italian family. The family saw it as immoral behavior, but the film doesn’t present it as such. The old fashioned paternalism and moral traditionalism of the family was the villain.
@H Paul Moon: “I am not responding” is a response.
@Jirin: Totally academic; you know what I meant. And I quite agree with you that the film is not moralistic; it is quite deliberately anti-moralism; and as such (for being rare in that regard) showered by love regardless of its simplistic methods (e.g., “lightning” as you put it), its failure to apppropriate the vintage epic, and its armchair feminism.
“This is basically a second-rate revival of Tilda Swinton’s early feminist film “Orlando” in a rather different era and with much less subtlety.”
Could you please elaborate as to how I AM LOVE is a revival of ORLANDO? The similarities are escaping me.
haven’t you been reading the thread Roscoe… HPMoon can’t elaborate on his point. It appears to be beneath his dignity. Or perhaps he’s afraid of being caught out. One of the two I suspect.
What does “caught out” mean (or, for that matter, Ehrenstein’s outburst, “YOU POINT”)? Yes, that is “beneath me.” If you can’t construct sentences, then take your debate to Netflix Customer Reviews, or Amazon.com. This is MUBI.
The most mediocre Visconti film that Visconti never made.
Clint
I saw it a few days ago and really, really liked it. Any other thoughts?